256 MB not enough RAM for Desktop-FreeBSD, a strange experience

[Ion-Mihai Tetcu]

On Wed, 27 Apr 2005 16:19:43 +0200
Benjamin Thelen <bt at ccgis.de> wrote:

> Hi list,
> 
> 
> I started using FreeBSD as a Desktop in December 04 with the hardware 
> configuration below
> 
> FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE-p2
> Asus TUSL-C with PIII-1133
> 256 MB RAM
> WDC WD800JB
> KDE 3.3.2
> OOo-1.1.4
> 
> 
> Very often OpenOffice-1.4 died on starting, just showing the splash 
> screen. I couldn't kill the process, even not with "-9". So I had to 
> reboot. Because of KDEs behavior to start applications, which have 
> been used before, OpenOffice was started automatically on KDEs 
> startup. Mostly successful. OpenOffice started a bit more	reliable 
> using XFCE4...
> 
> In combination with this FreeBSD was hanging on the end of a shutdown:
> No buffers busy after final sync
> 
> 
> I didn't find very helpful information on the net, but since I added 
> 256 MB of RAM I have never seen one of these errors.

I have an 4 yers old desktop at the office: Athlon at 1G, 256MB RAM which
runs happily gnome and openoffice.

> Does someone have any idea what that could have been caused? Adding 
> more RAM, gaining stability, gaining speed, ok...

Possibly some hardware-related stability since maybe it doesn't use all
the memory, it had to swap less, ..

It's hard to tell without some debug info.


-- 
IOnut
Unregistered ;) FreeBSD "user"